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Summary
Summary
Brit Teddy Mundy and German Sasha are the unlikeliest of friends. Teddy is a decent and optimistic bloke, orphaned by his twenties, who stumbles upon the German student uprisings in the 60s as he desperately searches for a family. Sasha is an intellectual, philosopher, and revolutionary who lives for his ideals. By the 1980s they are double agents. By the time the Berlin Wall crumbles, they are pensioned off and forgotten. In 2003, they reunite to fight America's Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Author Notes
David John Moore Cornwell was born in Poole, Dorsetshire, England in 1931. He attended Bern University in Switzerland from 1948-49 and later completed a B.A. at Lincoln College, Oxford. He taught at Eton from 1956-58 and was a member of the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964.
He writes espionage thrillers under the pseudonym John le Carré. The pseudonym was necessary when he began writing, in the early 1960s because, at that time, he held a diplomatic position with the British Foreign Office and was not allowed to publish under his own name. When his third book, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, became a worldwide bestseller in 1964, he left the foreign service to write full time. His other works include Call for the Dead; A Murder of Quality; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; and Smiley's People.
He has received numerous awards for his writing, including the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1986 and the Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association in 1988. In 2011 he accepted the Goethe Medal. And in 2020, he accepted the Olof Palme Prize. Ten of his books have been adapted for television and motion pictures including The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Russia House, The Constant Gardener, A Most Wanted Man, and Our Kind of Traitor.
Le Carré's memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from my Life, became a New York Times bestseller in 2016. In 2019, he published a spy thriller, Agent Running in the Field.
John Le Carré died on December 12, 2020 from pneumonia at the age of 89.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Le Carré may have changed publishers, but his latest novel remains as resolutely up-to-date as ever. In place of the old Cold War games, his recent books have dealt with the depredations of international arms merchants and the impact of predatory drug manufacturers on the Third World. Now his eloquent and white-hot indignation is turned on what he sees as a duplicitous war in Iraq and the devious means employed to tarnish those who oppose it. The friends of the title are two beautifully realized characters, both idealists in their very different ways. Ted Mundy, the bighearted son of a pukka Indian Army officer, leads a life in which his inborn kindliness and lack of self-regard are turned to what he sees as good causes. With Sasha, the crippled son of an old Nazi who turns bitterly against that past only to be tormented by the rise of a new brutalism in East Germany, he forms a double-agent partnership that feeds British intelligence during the Cold War years. With the collapse of the Soviet system, Ted is at loose ends, trying both to make ends meet as a cheery tour guide for English-speaking visitors to Mad Ludwig's castle in Bavaria and to support his Muslim wife and her small son in Munich. Suddenly he hears again from Sasha, who tells him that a mysterious benefactor wishes to enlist his services as teacher and translator to counter the widespread propaganda on behalf of an Iraqi war, and he is inflamed once more with a desire to help. The grim consequences are spelled out by le Carré with a deadly fury that is startling in the context of his usual urbanity. With a largely German setting that recalls some of his earliest books, as well as the same embracing clarity of vision about human motives and failings that gleams through all his best work, this is a book that offers a bitter warning even as it delivers immense reading pleasure.(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Few writers can introduce a character so well as the way John le Carre lifts the curtain on Ted Mundy in this novel's bravura opening pages. A bowler-hatted, middle-aged tour guide in "one of Mad King Ludwig's castles in Bavaria", he jokes with his audience and performs flights of etymological fancy, a deracinated Englishman soaked in comic melancholy. Soon enough we are transported back to Mundy's boyhood in newly independent Pakistan. He has a traditional Le Carre father, a lovable rogue: this time a drunken major who spins fantasies in his cups about Mundy's dead mother. The beautifully evoked idyll of Pakistan is cut short, however, and soon the major and his son are on their way back to England, a sudden change of atmosphere that the author effects in a line of swift brutality: "The England that awaits the young Mundy is a rain-swept cemetery for the living dead powered by a forty-watt bulb." At boarding school Mundy finds refuge in the German language. His father dies and he discovers the truth about his mother, who was a penniless Irish nurse rather than the omnitalented aristocrat the major pretended. Eventually Mundy goes to Oxford, and for his year abroad finds himself in the underworld of student protest in 1969 Berlin. Here the tempo relaxes; the exquisitely pitched snapshots of the hero's early life give way to superbly observed storytelling in the anarchist student commune that Mundy makes his home. It is a world where people might ask, "Do you share the opinion of Marcuse that logical positivism is a load of shit?" as a prelude to sex. Le Carre can draw a comic but convincingly unique thumbnail sketch of a minor character in a couple of lines, and the sights, sounds and smells of Berlin are evoked with wondrous economy. It is here that the gangling, naive young Mundy meets Sasha, a short, dark, angry German who is the commune's intellectual engine, and they become friends: a fateful attachment. Having been beaten up by the police and ejected from Germany, Mundy becomes a teacher in an English prep school, wondering whether he may not be a writer, a possibility dismissed by the author with wry speed: "In the school holidays he persuades himself that he is the coming Evelyn Waugh, a view not shared by publishers." Eventually Mundy finds himself a sinecure with the British Council, and on a trip to East Germany with a youth theatre troupe he meets Sasha again, who is now a member of the GDR's secret police, the Stasi. Sasha, disillusioned by the evils of state communism, has a cunning plan: he wants to pretend to recruit Mundy as an agent for his side, while in fact passing secrets to the west via his old friend. So begins the spy story. The narrative of induction is rather attenuated: there are references to Mundy's training at something called "the Edinburgh school of deportment", but this is not a forensic story of tradecraft as of old. Instead Le Carre demonstrates again how the world of espionage both comes as comfort to a certain character type, and accelerates his psychic trifurcation. Mundy splits into Mundy One (the reliable British Council hand) and Mundy Two (the spy), both watched over by Mundy Three, "the silent spectator". His friendship with Sasha - the only person with whom Mundy can be completely open and honest - quickly becomes the only true relationship of his life, and Le Carre finally unleashes the Conradian phrase he appears to have been saving up: Sasha is Mundy's "secret sharer". Le Carre tells the story of the years leading up to 1989 in another series of dramatic tableaux, thickening atmospheres with an almost casual expertise. Of course he has done this many times before, but still there is a frisson to the chosen details - for example, the apparition in some foreign land of an elderly night porter: "Another retired spy . . . Watching over the world while it sleeps. Sleeping while it goes to the devil." And then, two-thirds of the way through the novel, something very odd happens. What was a masterful, elegiac character study in the mould of Le Carre's classic A Perfect Spy becomes an angry disquisition on contemporary geopolitics. The flashback narrative catches up with the modern timeline, and Sasha and Mundy meet again for the first time since the fall of the Berlin wall. Mundy is appalled by the 2003 war in Iraq, and loathes Tony Blair for having taken Britain into it: this now becomes the novel's message as Sasha joins in the rhetorical denunciations of American neo-imperalism and tries to seduce Mundy into a new scheme for resisting it. Something goes wrong with the free indirect style around this point, so that the demarcation between Mundy's thoughts and the author's - familiar from his recent media appearances - is unhelpfully blurred. Here is Mundy reflecting on the reasons for his new-found political anger: "It's the discovery, in his sixth decade, that half a century after the death of Empire, the dismally ill- managed country he'd done a little of this and that for is being marched off to quell the natives on the strength of a bunch of lies, in order to please a renegade hyperpower that thinks it can treat the rest of the world as its allotment." Meanwhile, Sasha begins quoting Mundy's own words back at him: "Your little Prime Minister is not the American President's poodle, he is his blind dog, I hear . . . Supported by Britain's 'servile corporate media', he has given spurious respectability to American imperalism." And a mysterious new character chimes in: "It was an old Colonial oil war dressed up as a crusade for Western life and liberty, and it was launched by a clique of war-hungry Judaeo- Christian geopolitical fantasists who hijacked the media and exploited America's post-Nine Eleven psychopathy." However much sympathy the reader might have for this point of view, as presented it very nearly torpedoes the entire novel. No dissenting voice is offered, and the action stops for a long time while everybody tells each other the same thing. There is no true dramatic debate; the fiction crashes on the rocks of op-ed. Absolute Friends climaxes with a covert atrocity perpetrated by the US. This conspiriological revelation, arguing the extreme deviousness of unofficial American foreign policy, has already been attacked in some reviews for being implausible. By "implausible" the critics in these instances meant "not likely to happen in the real world". This is an odd complaint. Anyone betting against the deviousness of unofficial American foreign policy over the last several decades would have lost countless shirts. Furthermore, the critic outraged by "implausibility" seems to be assuming a superior knowledge of future affairs that is not available to the humble novelist - nor was it to the huge apparatus of American state security that failed to predict the entirely implausible notion that a group of terrorists might hijack two passenger aircraft and fly them into the World Trade Centre. We live in an implausible world. The ending of Le Carre's novel is problematic not because it is unlikely, but because it is both over-determined and gratuitous. Over-determined, because in the scheme of this novel there is no other villain in the modern world than America. And gratuitous because it is a deus ex machina that merely serves to illustrate the novel's politicised ranting. There is nothing wrong with the event itself, but it takes place in an insufficiently prepared context. Le Carre could conceivably have justified it by writing a novel set entirely among the contemporary western intelligence agencies, with characters seriously discussing questions of ends and means in a war against terror. Given his enormous and undimmed skills as a storyteller, that could have been a brilliant book. But the sophisticated analysis of moral questions, of deceit personal and political, and of shabby ends to justify honourable means, that characterised his classic cold war novels is here finally drowned out by strident editorialising, the monotonous expression of an anger imperfectly interrogated and so unhoned. Where once there was a subtle knife, here there is only a blunt stick. Alarmingly, by the end of this often brilliant but broken-backed novel, Le Carre is beginning to sound like Frederick Forsyth. To order Absolute Friends for pounds 16.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-carre.1 Soon enough we are transported back to [Ted Mundy]'s boyhood in newly independent Pakistan. He has a traditional [John le Carre] father, a lovable rogue: this time a drunken major who spins fantasies in his cups about Mundy's dead mother. The beautifully evoked idyll of Pakistan is cut short, however, and soon the major and his son are on their way back to England, a sudden change of atmosphere that the author effects in a line of swift brutality: "The England that awaits the young Mundy is a rain-swept cemetery for the living dead powered by a forty-watt bulb." So begins the spy story. The narrative of induction is rather attenuated: there are references to Mundy's training at something called "the Edinburgh school of deportment", but this is not a forensic story of tradecraft as of old. Instead Le Carre demonstrates again how the world of espionage both comes as comfort to a certain character type, and accelerates his psychic trifurcation. Mundy splits into Mundy One (the reliable British Council hand) and Mundy Two (the spy), both watched over by Mundy Three, "the silent spectator". His friendship with Sasha - the only person with whom Mundy can be completely open and honest - quickly becomes the only true relationship of his life, and Le Carre finally unleashes the Conradian phrase he appears to have been saving up: Sasha is Mundy's "secret sharer". Then, two-thirds of the way through the novel, something very odd happens. What was a masterful, elegiac character study in the mould of Le Carre's classic A Perfect Spy becomes an angry disquisition on contemporary geopolitics. The flashback narrative catches up with the modern timeline, and Sasha and Mundy meet again for the first time since the fall of the Berlin wall. Mundy is appalled by the 2003 war in Iraq, and loathes Tony Blair for having taken Britain into it: this now becomes the novel's message as Sasha joins in the rhetorical denunciations of American neo-imperalism and tries to seduce Mundy into a new scheme for resisting it. - Steven Poole.
Kirkus Review
The collapse of the new world order catches still another of le CarrÉ's inoffensive spies out hopelessly past his depth. Ted Mundy calls the well-nigh unrecognizable person he's morphed into since his Berlin days as student radical "Mundy Two." But in fact he's gone through more lives than a biographical encyclopedia: child of both India and Pakistan, official greeter for a British arts organization, overseas youth liaison for same, husband to a rising politico: all activities that made him a perfect choice for the role of counterintelligence agent when a well-informed Polish defector happened to fall into his hands--and, since parting ways with his government masters, co-principal of a shabby Heidelberg language school, common-law husband to a Turkish kebab waitress, and tour guide at one of King Ludwig's Bavarian castles. But the great relationship that's ordered, or disordered, his life has been with Sasha, the equally protean fellow-student turned Stasi agent turned itinerant radical lecturer. After chapters and chapters of beautifully written but frustrating flashbacks to the political and personal forces that made Ted what he is and abandoned him in the Linderhof, le CarrÉ brings him smartly to attention with an offer of $500,000 from the mysterious philanthropist Dimitri, of the New Planet Foundation, to refurbish the language school in order to foster greater international understanding. Sasha urges the deal on Ted; his old British handler Nick Amory regards it with suspicion. Readers who remember any of the author's celebrated earlier novels (The Constant Gardener, 2001, etc.), or who've picked up a newspaper during the past two years, will know which is right, though not necessarily why. Despite a piercing, compassionate portrait of a decent man struggling to keep up with a world in the throes of constant change, le CarrÉ seems this time outpaced by his impossible subject: the layers upon layers of real-life duplicity in the world since 9/11. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
There has been a linear evolution in the mind-set of le Carre's spies over the years--from agonizing over the moral ambiguity of the craft set against a firm belief in its necessity (the Smiley novels), through opting to place individual values over national ones (A Perfect Spy and Russia House), to recognizing that bureaucracy has poisoned the intelligence business from within (the post-cold war novels). Now, driven by recent world events, that evolution takes an even more radical step--to the realization that ideology is irrelevant, that powerful governments are an evil unto themselves, forever the enemy of individual life. It is a harrowing journey to that somber knowledge for Ted Mundy, expatriate son of a British army officer, and his "absolute friend," the crippled German radical Sasha, whose idealism finally engenders its own chaos and makes him easy prey for the powerful. Jumping backward and forward in time, le Carre reveals the history of a friendship in the context of a lifetime of commitment gone sour: student radicalism in Berlin during the '60s; active spying for the West during the waning years of the cold war; and, finally, a parting of the ways, with Sasha continuing to search for the revolution of his dreams while Teddy finds a separate peace. But Iraq and a reunion with his friend reignite Teddy's fervor, paving the way for the inevitable tragedy. Yes, le Carre uses Teddy as a mouthpiece for some strong political opinions (the U.S. is described as a "hyperpower that thinks it can treat the rest of the world as its allotment"), but the novel never becomes the author's soapbox. The human story remains paramount, even if the chilling message is that human stories don't stand much of a chance in the world as we find it. BillOtt.
Library Journal Review
The friends here are Ted Mundy, a politically na?ve Englishman, and Sasha, his German mentor in 1969 Berlin as student radical and spy. A failure as a writer, Ted stumbles into becoming a double agent for a government for which he seemingly has few sympathies. Like all of le Carr?'s heroes, Ted is a tortured soul, haunted by a hapless father, lost loves, and an estranged son. Sasha is the only one who truly understands and appreciates him, but both get caught up in post-9/11 political machinations. All this leads to a more cynical resolution than is typical of le Carr?. The best reader of his work is the author himself, and while John Lee's narration seems a bit clipped and formal at the beginning, he settles down once the plot gets rolling. Lee does an exceptional job with the European characters, especially the colorful Sasha. While not up to le Carr? at his best, this is still recommended for all collections. Michael Adams, CUNY Graduate Ctr. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
